oA man reflects on the things he had to buy after his wife left, most notably a TV. He decides to put his new TV in his bedroom, thinks about how “Mauricia had never wanted a TV in the bedroom; her doctor told her it was terrible for insomnia. When we watched something in bed it was on a laptop, growing warm awkwardly on my knees.” He reflects on how he got to this place, to this town, where he was “what the academics call a trailing spouse: a lecturer, not a professor, hired cheaply and out of convenience for all involved.” His wife was the professor. He thinks then about how the town he lives in, the university where he teaches, himself, his wife—how none of these things exist. Then he clarifies: “I don’t mean to say nothing exists. It could be that you, who are reading this, exist. In fact, for the sake of argument, let’s assume it: you are a solid object, immovable, reading these words on paper bound in a magazine or book, or on a screen, but in any case some kind of object.” He reflects on his wife, ending things with him while the man she was having an affair with waited in the car. When he leaves, he tells that man, “I’m pretty sure none of this is happening.”

He thinks about the TV. It’s a newer TV where everything is three-dimensional. He thinks about perspective. He thinks about a painting he saw years ago at the Art Institute in Chicago, when his wife was a PhD student. It was a modern interpretation of an Early Modern painting, Pontormo’s The Visitation. His wife liked it, but the man couldn’t make up his mind about it. He tells his wife, “It’s not that I don’t like The Greeting, I totally do like it, it’s just that I kind of feel it’s looking back at me with contempt.” 

Now, he opens his laptop and starts an essay on perspective. Drinking, he changes the title from “Resistant Objects: The Politics of Perspective in HDTV7” to “Justify Your Existence.” This is in reference to a game he played as a teenager where him and his friends would corner a freshman and say, “Justify your existence. You’ve got thirty seconds.” Reflecting on it now, he thinks, “The true horror of the game lies in realizing not that you have no reason for existing but that, viewed by a hostile eye, or frankly any eye at all, you don’t exist. You have no depth.” He goes on to think, “What if the secret paradox of object relations is that there are no objects, only perspectives and relations between perspectives?”

One of his students—“the smartest student [he]’d ever had”—calls and asks to borrow his car. When he said he couldn’t loan an undergraduate his car, the student says another one of his students is missing. The man says he’ll go with him. They drive out to the lake, which is frozen over. The student finds the girl, who is axing a hole in the ice. She’s taken some Molly, which is why the student has been worried about her disappearance. She’s wearing a racing swimsuit, wants to dip down into the frozen lake for a second. She tells her friend to hold the rope. He tells her to wait, but she’s already running, jumping in. He runs after her, right to “the edge of the hole…and when he stepped down hard the ice collapsed.” The man is “pulled forward onto [his] knees, and then flat on [his] chest.”

He thinks again about how he doesn’t exist. How nothing in this story is real. “Or, to put it another way: nothing I do here is justified. I’ve wasted your time.” He reflects on this further: “This is what I came here to say: viewed from the correct perspective, humans are a waste of time.”

He thinks about his wife, how they met, how quickly they moved in together, how fast their relationship proceeded after that. “It was a terrible mistake, our friends said at the time, speaking with one voice, but it was our mistake. Somehow that seemed crucial.”  On the ice, he thinks about how he “had never properly communicated his nonexistence to her, and vice-versa,” that “[they] had never recognized one another’s non-selves.”

The man pulls, and the student pulls the girl out of the frozen lake. The man “[breaks] down the ice-house door so [they] could get inside and light the propane heater, thank god it was there.” He calls 911. They warm each other while they wait. The students end up with “mild hypothermia, both of them, that’s all.”

He thinks about the reader, thinks about how they reached out to help him pull. “I felt your fingers grasping at the folds on the back of my coat,” he says. “Isn’t that beautiful?” And then, “That’s what I want to write. The sentence that holds just enough tension to keep us together, together, together, and then says, I don’t need any of you, and lets go.”